In the interest of preserving the event that led to more Captain Phillips references than any other in the history of Eve I have copied just about everything noteworthy I could find for future generations. A fair amount of stuff was deleted from the /r/bravenewbies sub-reddit and is now lost. I didn't include very many popular comments in the archive either so hopefully someone doesn't go through and delete those either. They don't add a ton to the overall story, but they're still fun to read.

Rough Timeline

Pregame Entertainment

Elise Randolph, Pandemic Legion Executor, posts his Catch War AAR to the /r/bravenewbies subreddit as requested. It is deleted because he mentions Pandemic Horde, and this is construed as recruiting.

A Q&A is hosted, not by coup leaders, but by a Brave personality, Kira "Too Many Titles To List" Tsukimoto. It goes badly and she threatens to sue those who are recording her under Australian law. When called out she responds with the classic "I Was Only Trolling" card.

A coup leader lets slip that disobeyed Lychton by ordering the evacuation of HED lowsec and was responsible for the whole terrible mess. Previously, everyone blamed Lychton. Oops I guess. Elise, broken by Brave's rejection is now feverish and bedridden. In a delirious haze he provides context on the further ramifications of this action. Double oops.

In the meanwhile, Elise's health has continued to deteriorate in light of Brave's hatred. Deathly ill, he is savagely beaten by a man who had just escaped the mental-ward in the same hospital. Elise slips into a coma from which we are unsure if he will recover.

Both sides agree they didn't want to win anyway, and Lychton declares the game over with a score of zero to zero. He alludes to possible management changes, his retirement, and a changing of the guard. However, it's unclear how Brave will actually function going forward.

TEST walks onto the field and realizes that now is their chance to make a play. Sadly, like JEFFRAIDER's beloved Seattle Seahawks, instead of running they pass – judgment on the coup by blacklisting its leaders along with setting them kill on sight. Oddly, their list includes people in the bleachers who weren't even playing the game. It also includes the new leader of Brave Collective who they are still nominally blue with. Unfortunately, as the game ended two days ago, with the stadium empty and everyone sitting at home, their timely judgment has no chance of actually influencing the game itself.

Memorial Ceremony & Hall Of Fame Induction

Roughly a week since the coup was set into motion both sides gathered on the field to commemorate that time Brave Leadership did something. Speeches were made, flags waved, and newbies drank the kool-aid that was so graciously provided. In the regular course of the ceremony, Lychton made a speech dedicating the giant bronze statue that was to serve as the game's memorial. As the crane lifted the statue over the field the coup leaders noticed a few discrepancies with the design. They had envisioned two men meeting in the middle of a field in bloom, shaking hands, and a rainbow banner with the words "The Future" unfurled above them. Instead they saw a giant bronze middle finger. Okay, maybe there were more than a few discrepancies. One of the leaders, Lquid, jumped from his seat to yell "This isn't what we agreed to!" and Lychton responded, "There were some issues in the execution. Stay classy." With those last word out of his mouth gave the crane operator, aDAMNPATRIOT, a thumbs up. Signal received the operator pressed the release button, appropriately labeled counter-coup, dropping the massive statue on the leaders of the revolt. They were all crushed.

So, some people have asked me on the Brave subreddit for an AAR of sorts from the PL perspective. This was intentionally made to be posted on /r/BraveNewbies but the threads got deleted and I got banned from posting there. Someone is just having a bad day, I'm sure. Or maybe they knew that people in /r/Eve would find it interesting. Regardless, if some of the pronouns seem to refer to Brave, that's why.

I love to post, as you’ve no doubt figured out, and I do love you guys. For the most part you guys like me too; I’ve only once been embraced like this from another alliance and that was with PL (back when I wasn’t in PL). That said if you are of the opinion that I’m here to ~meta game~ you or sow seeds of discontent, you really don’t want to read further. It’s going to make you upset, and I have no intentions of doing anything like that.

Unfortunately due to length I had to split things into two parts. Luckily we were here twice!

The Beginning

To start things off, I was actually not active in Eve when we were three-way’ing the fights in Provi. Making timers in the Dominion sov system is really awful, though, so it’s always the most low-effort-fun to jump in when two parties are doing all the work for you. I was very active when we made the decision, post Phoebe, to move to Curse. The reason was because the game – our brand of game – was being changed. While we weren’t working or doing anything major, we had this really neat deployment model called Rapid Deployments. Basically, any FC could come up with a budget and plan to go to a certain area and just get fights. Maybe for one week, maybe for one month. So PL would stage in Amamake and take one Carrier load of ships to the Rapid Deployment zone and see what happens. Sometimes they were fun, sometimes they were busts, but they were very fun and easy to do. Anyways, Phoebe changed that with the jump range and jump fatigue mechanic so we had to be more deliberate with our moves. We chose Curse because several people were in the area, but mostly because we knew Brave fought.

With Phoebe we also needed to stress-test some new doctrines. We had some theories at what would be strong, but just like anything with Eve you need hands on practice to see what actually works. There is no need to rehash every fight (though I must say, you guys are so much shit to bombs) but suffice to say that you were a fantastic stress test for us. We eventually settled on what worked and what didn’t. The most spectacular failure we had, though, was to put tracking-fit Nyxes in a safe spot assigning Fighters under a scan inhibitor. I was confident that this would be the most hilarious thing ever, but it never worked. We actually had an awful track-record with dropping caps in general. You guys fielded so much triage in every fight that the only thing we could do was tank and wait for the GODBOMB. I know it’s narrative destroying to suggest that you guys fielded caps, but you guys did it for every single timer and got away with it.

At the time we had no idea of this, but there was a lot of undue panic from your leadership and middle management speculating about our presence. We were just there to have fun and shoot dudes, but the leadership channels became gridlocked with doom-and-gloom drama while trying to come up with a narrative to motivate people. I think this the one areaa of the game that Brave is very weak at: managing the management.

From my perspective (obviously), these guys have a very warped view of the game. It’s like they learned how to run a coalition from Chinese whispers of how to run a coalition; “you have to manage the meta, you have to fabricate a narrative” etc. In reality you only need a narrative to motivate an otherwise unwilling coalition to go to war. And you have to be very careful in making one; it’s easy for a story to backfire and make you look like an idiot. You guys weren’t in that position at all; the narrative you came up with actually disparaged you more. So there was this very gung-ho excitement phase, followed by this abject depression a few days later when things didn’t pan out (you got bombed really hard). But it’s ok, because things turned around.

I’m not sure what happened, but you spun out of your funk and rebounded. There were some good results, and you guys came up with this really nifty plan to drop on our caps as they were grinding. Out of nowhere, 40something dreads dropped on one of our titans. Unfortunately you guys had a bit of a miscommunication and dropped on the /wrong/ Titan and it lived – but it was exciting! You guys took a swing at the giant and made him bleed. This type of action – an invention and risky decision that your military directorship was really against – inspired you guys more than anything else.

The all-time killer in Eve Online – the one thing responsible for more alliance collapses and expensive losses – is hubris. We try like the plague to avoid it, but occasionally we get caught with our pants down. This happened to PK’s Avatar. Another plan – this time executed perfectly – and you bagged your first ever Titan and Super kill. Swagger came flowing through you, and fleet participation skyrocketed. Nothing cleanses quite like the champagne bath of victory. In HED you guys successfully defended the station (using caps), and you bagged your SECOND Titan kill. That one wasn’t due to our hubris or a trap, just a questionable FC decision (yours truly) that didn’t pan out. It was actually very fun for us, and I think it goes down in Eve history as the biggest fight (in terms of ship kills) the game has seen. No narrative, no fear mongering, no bureaucratic red tape, just fun in the sun. This is where you are strongest, this is where you are a force of nature.

We were still experimenting and learning just how strong caps were in Phoebe (an aside, we learned that they’re significantly stronger now) and then got a contract offer. In November we made the decision to just get rid of our rental empire – which was the biggest in the game – to just do our own thing. As a result it meant that we had to make money another way and we defaulted to mercenary work. Although you guys were way more fun, we started to make plans to move over to the dreaded dronelands.

The Second Coming

Having played this game for so long, and having learned from some of the best guys out there, I appreciate better than most that is almost impossible to plan more than six weeks in advance. If you try to plan out your next year – or even six months - you’ll quickly find that things fall apart. So on our way out I approached your leadership about coming up with a deal so that we would leave you guys alone. We asked to buy some of the supercaps you were building for someone else in exchange for leaving your sov alone. Not bending at the knee or paying a tithe to be our pets, but just buying some ships you were building at buildcost +15%. Some of you leadership were keen on the deal – many weren’t informed all together – and others were of the opinion that it would set a bad precedent. Eventually the information leaked that we were leaving (XIX made a morale speech saying that we would be coming down to assist them), and the tone changed instantly. It seemed to me that you guys thought you had found some hidden leverage (the intel came from an /r/eve thread) and wanted to boast proudly how PL was thwarted! I personally thought the deal was fair and wasn’t a bad precedent, but of course I came up with the deal so it shouldn’t be a surprise.

Anyways we left and you guys went back do doing your thing. I was still active on the Brave subreddit, and of course there was a bit of drama because honestly it’s something you guys love. I don’t get it, but it’s undeniably part of you and a little bit isn’t a bad thing. As our contract was finishing up we were deciding what to do next. Moving our cap fleet is a pain in the butt, so again we went with the “sure thing” instead of moving to Venal or Fountain and risk having to spend a week or two moving AGAIN to find some fun. There was a bit of action in the Stain area this time, so we popped on by. Close to Brave, close to fun.

We started doing our thing again and like clockwork, the “narrative and meta” questions started coming back. You guys went with a similar approach; stating that we were here to invade and going for 3GD as our primary target. I actually touched on this in a Reddit thread that got a lot of attention (http://www.reddit.co..._legion/covuvk4) and kind of warned of the dangers. But again, that’s just my opinion. You guys fully embraced the Tengu/Eagle thing, and we countered that hard. Like, mega hard. Our TFIs did work. We used to have a system in Catch, L7X, that we used for a cyno beacon and logistics. Upon moving to Stain some of our logi dudes requested a replacement system for L7X (you guys took it when we left) and we settled on F4R. We went for it with everything we had, and honestly it wasn’t easy. It’s not like we were going easy on you to farm for fights, as some of the more cynical people assumed – we legit wanted the system. There was a very funny moment when we just dropped a ball of caps on it and ended up LOSING to one of you guys getting the last hit on it and saving the system. It was honestly one of the funniest things ever.

As far as strategic objectives, you guys were doing markedly better. Every system that you showed up to got saved. Fleet participation was high, more and more people were getting into Tengus, and losses were much lower. But then the drama snake reared its head once more. Apathy got kicked, Test and HONOR decided to leave HERO, and more bureaucratic drama came oozing from some leadership. We just wanted to keep having the fights, and objectively we were getting incredibly good at them. But instead of the exuberance and carefree attitude we saw some months prior - the attitude that led to three super kills – we saw vitriol and sour attitudes. It seems to me that the “narrative” some people tried to craft just got eaten up by the leadership people instead of the line member. A toxic Ouroboros, of sorts. Some have argued that the “average line member” was burning out, but fleet participation was going up. I never really got the impression that the line member hated life in Catch.

A Tale of Two Braves

This is when I began to notice two very different Braves. The one, excitable players – new and old alike – committed to having fun with a penchant for making drama from nothing. The other, a bloated and over-stressed paper-pushing behemoth sucked into a black hole of its own making. Bickering and in-fighting created this circle of self-pity that started to bleed out of leadership and into the 99% of Brave that just likes to have fun. It’s not a very flattering picture I’m painting, and I’m not necessarily blaming them – leading a coalition is a tricky process – but that is what I feel happened. Nobody was trying to be bad or cause some sort of self-destruction, it was just this petri dish that we inadvertently added heat to.

Our intentions were never to create some cracks or conquer Catch. As I mentioned before, planning more than 6 weeks in advance never actually works. We wanted to pass the time having fun with people we knew could have fun. We never really thought of you as a game preserve, nor did we want to ~meta you~ for some geopolitical end. I found it really hard to deny some of these accusations because the response was – quite unironically – “well that’s what someone who is trying to manipulate us would say”. It was really comical, truth be told, but the average line member seemed to appreciate my presence so I just shook those guys off. Like I said, they are The Other Brave.

Eventually GE happened. I explained what happened in this thread (along with some Dominion Sov Q&A http://www.reddit.co...nforced/cpgbvx1) but tl;dr our AUTZ was waiting for fatigue to end and shot GE with your SBUs up. Later we dropped our own SBUs in GE to distract you from another target (CNC-4V – a system we thought we may need later) but hilariously enough you guys kept shooting the CNC SBUs and let the GE ones go up unmolested. You have no idea how frustrated Ron Mexxico was at this. Of course when the GE final timer came up, you guys responded with the single biggest coalition you have ever made. You had more caps than we had people and the system was saved in 5 minutes. Saved as in the station was repped, the SBUs were killed. It was beautiful. Although I got headshot like 3 times and my fleet couldn’t do jack shit, I was still oddly proud. I knew you guys had it in you. It was reminiscent of the fun-loving Brave that dropped caps on our Titan (except it was strangely effective). And you did this while your main FC was at Fanfest. Real talk, you deserve to be proud of that showing. Meanwhile I was raging at my AUTZ for riling you up like this, assuming that every fleet we faced would be 500 strong now and we’d have to think up of new ways to fight you.

With things dying down, we started to plan for our immediate future. I was spitballing some ideas with other FCs and we had a thought: what if we took Brave with us? At Fanfest a few of our FCs were hanging out with Blue Ice and said to me “hey this guy is cool, figure out a way to work with this guy”. The consummate facilitator, I came up with a plan and pitched it to your leadership: we’ll blue one another (and obviously not touch Catch), split the profits 50-50, and go do contract work together. You guys could be as autonomous or integrated as you wanted, and could stop at any time. The figure we were offered at the time was 600b, splitting it 50-50 for 8 weeks. A fair amount of money, but I understood that some people would probably need some motivation to work with the guys that were so vigorously shooting them in the face for a few months. I knew full well we’d get maybe 100-150 dudes to come on fleets with us, but to me that was enough. I was confident people would have fun and numbers would swell. Unfortunately, what I have dubbed The Other Brave apparently didn’t like it. I’m honestly not sure how much of this leadership proper knew of this proposition, but the response I got was – at best – tepid.

I don’t know if it was a trust issue or if your leadership honestly believed this was just a contrived plot to steal away their members. I’ll be honest, you guys have hemorrhaged a lot of talented people and –apart from Apathy guys – none joined PL. I was pretty gutted that we had to shelve the plan, but things happen and I respect that. I told your guys that no matter what you chose we wouldn’t hold the decision against you. This is going to be hard to believe given what happened next (we took GE and HED), but we were quite honest in this. We actually had struck a deal with a member of the Brave Diplomatic team (who was acting on his own) to not take any final timers so long as you guys were actively defending. When you guys announced plans for Brave Mercenaries, this benefactor informed us that the deal was off and we could do whatever.

Almost there

Since I’ve been rambling for a bit I would be remiss if I didn’t restate a few disclaimers. When I’m saying here is my honest interpretation of events – through the PL lens, of course. If you are of the mind that I’m out to coup attempt #12 or spin you into death, you definitely don’t want to read on. I am doing this purely because you guys asked me for my opinion.

People in Eve are motivated by different things. PL is motivated first and foremost by tears generated from our actions. It’s weird and hard to understand if you’re not part of it, but it’s what we do. Your evacuation/move/deployment thing, whatever it was, is to date the biggest clusterfuck I’ve seen in spaceships. I say this from a place of love, but it was a complete disaster. I can sort of understand how it happened, though. The Other Brave – the management types – figured that they had their bargaining chip. PL wanted to work with Brave, so we wouldn’t dare take HED or GE! Have we met? Capitalizing on chaos is our bread and butter. Specifically when you guys singled out three systems you would defend at all costs, we just ran at them to see what would happen. So that is how we accidentally took Catch.

But we don’t hate you and we don’t want you to fail. Brave do a great service and are largely really cool people. The Other Brave – the 1%- do you a bit of a disservice. But hey! They’re learning. So long as, like Brave members, they’re OK to take criticisms then all is well. I still want to work with you guys on a contract in the future and that offer we had is forever on the table. I can’t promise it’ll be 600b, but you can pick and choose.

In the meantime, HED and GE are both freeported (if they aren’t now they will be shortly – make sure to check with something cheap first), so if you have things in there you can get them out whenever. Be very careful moving things out, we certainly won’t be guarding the path or blue’ing people – but we’re not in the business of trapping the livelihood of anyone; the silent curses are not where our fun comes from.

In fact we love Brave so much you have inspired a bunch of people in PL to embrace the new players. Whenever you look at player retention graphs it’s always depressing to see just how many people try the game and just give up. So following your lead we’ve made a newbie group all our own called Pandemic Horde (/r/PandemicHorde[3] ). We're a bit different, but the same underlying idea. I’ll be helping out as will JEFFRAIDER, but the real pillars are: Travis, Lament, Cyberking, Sting, Brood, and Gobbins. All these guys were inspired by you to help new players get sucked into the game with us. People joke that PL has the Stockholm Effect on their allies, but it's just the opposite this time around. It’s not just a flippant weekend thing, either; we’re fully committed into this project. They'll be living in HED, too, so when you fly through be sure to teach them what it means to lose a ship in style. Maybe one day soon you will have a Sansha Stronghold in their staging system! So thank you, sincerely, for inspiring us to make the game better.

Everything that I stated in the State of the Coalition is true; you guys are a fantastic group with an amazing potential. Your future is bright, your stuff is not locked in Catch, and I look forward to the day that we can fly together. I hope the read wasn’t too dry and you found it interesting. Of course, I appreciate any feedback or suggestions of topics that you may be interested in.

I felt it was important to let you know ASAP why Elise Randolph's thread keeps getting removed from the subreddit so as to help with tinfoil hattery.

First context: Elise offered to write up a post outlining the whole Catch perspective from the perspective of a PL member. This is awesome, as Elise is fun to read.

Unfortunately: At the end of the post, there was a advertisement that pretty blatantly was aimed to snipe members away. As open as we keep this subreddit to the public, we aren't going to allow that here.

Feel free to kill the messenger in the comments below. I won't take any of it personally.

As you may or may not be aware, the majority of alliance leadership including BRAVE directors and the CEOs of various member corporations in BRAVE Collective began a process to revoke control of the alliance from the present executor Lychton Kondur.

This action is an extreme measure but the individuals involved were unfortunately forced to act due to the actions and decisions of Lychton. Everyone involved has in one way or another approached Lychton repeatedly in regards to his decisions and actions, and we have come to a point where we could no longer in good faith allow Lychton to stay as alliance executor.

Do not believe that we did this willingly. It was done so to make sure that BRAVE could effectively keep functioning and provide the promise that it was based on. BRAVE is a place where newbies can learn and have fun and provide a place where bitter vets from all parts of New Eden can freely spread their wings devoid of the petty meta game burden which seems to plague so many of the pre-existing organizations in EVE.

We are aware that the next few days will be a period that will be tumultuous and agonizing but it is for the best. We hope to have all alliance operations up and running as soon as we possibly can and we apologize in advance for any consternation or anxiety that this process may create. We would also like to clearly state that this change does not mean BRAVE is leaderless, the CNM will be continuing their role, specifically Lquid Drisseg will be continuing as Head of the Diplomatic Department and Anna Niedostepny will be continuing as Head of the Military Division.

Additionally, after significant discussion, Malanek Askelus has been selected as the new leader of BRAVE Collective and has the needed support and endorsement to carry out this new role. Ongoing talks will be happening in the coming hours and days to ensure this transition goes ahead as smoothly as possible and to mitigate any concerns many of you may currently be having.

We will continue to provide periodic updates of what is happening via whatever avenues that we can use.

My name is Eva. I'm an ex-Brave member, currently getting shouted at by Elo in BL. I grew up in Brave, and I'd like to stop shitposting for a moment to say this:

Lychton was with Brave since its inception, and has been at the forefront for well over a year.

In that year, Brave grew from a bunch of drunk dudes in Talwars to a sovereignty holding coalition (one hundred systems strong), capable of fielding hundreds of Eagles/Tengus, over a thousand players when it really wanted to, and standing in the face of one of the strongest military alliances in the game for an impressive amount of time.

Lychton may not be the guy to lead Brave any more (my opinions on this are not relevant in this post), but he still (with help from many many good, indespensible people) oversaw the birth and growth one of the most remarkable things to happen in Eve for many many years, and that shouldn't be forgotten.

It's entirely likely that without Lychton, Brave wouldn't quite be what it is today and although his departure from the role of executor is involuntary and enacted in an unfortunate way, his contributions to Brave should be commended and remembered.

The past few weeks have been an exercise in restraint, patience, and spacepolitiks. I woke up to learn that the overwhelming number of directors and CEOs had exercised the corp voting mechanic in order to remove me as Alliance executor while I was asleep last night. Furthermore, this was on the heels of being advised daily by my core leadership circle leaving me in the dark about upcoming plans.

Let me say that I am thoroughly disappointed by the actions of my space peers. However, if there is one thing that is paramount, it is that BNI, BRAVE, and HERO have a mission to harness the enthusiasm and power of the newbro. With that said, I will not let personal anger or frustrations jeopardize the progress that we have made thusfar. Now, let’s get ready to rumble:

I hold no official position as to the status of BRAVE remaining the leader among equals with our coalition partners within HERO. If the alliance rostership wishes to remain, so be it. For the alliances that are one foot out of the door already, I will be coordinating with Malanek to add you to the targeting list.

Within BRAVE itself, while I am troubled by the method by which the council sought to remove me, and their (self-perceived) short sightedness, I am not going to challenge Malanek in terms of holding the Executor role. In addition, I am looking into passing the reigns of Brave Newbies Incorporated over the next few days, weeks, whatever. I have not confirmed who my successor will be, but you will all know if I elect to go down this path. If I do not find someone suitable, well, it looks like we are all going to have to play nice.

Now, I am going to hold Malanek to task for performing under this new capacity. As such, I am keeping 100% of the shares for all BRAVE related entities. BNI, B-BRV, TLOGI, DOJO, U-W0T, BPRIV, and a few more that I know I am forgetting. Malanek will retain full operational control of the alliance, but should he go rogue, I will use the corporate share mechanism to retake control. I do this not to be obstructionist but to preserve the core value of BRAVE until I trust that his intentions are pure for the long term. If Malanek proves to be a focused leader that is beneficial to the Collective, I will then release the majority of those shares to him. Trust, but verify.

Lastly, I am dissolving the 501c3 corporation that we created IRL. Lquid Drisseg and Bronopoly will be stripped of the Officer powers, and I have temporarily suspended the donate@bravecollective.com service, as it is tied to my real life financial accounts. Once a new paypal account is established, I will immediately transfer all remaining assets to the new account and then walk away from the rl money mgmt corp. In the near term, the deal with our merchandising needs to be revisited by the new executor, as the current payment disbursement mechanism is no longer an option.

To all the newbies in our great Alliance, thank you for letting me be the one to hold this gigantic bag of cats for the past 18 months or so. It’s been a great experience, growing this organization to where we are today. I am not leaving BNI or Brave for that matter, although I am going to use this free time to enjoy not dealing with multiple problems per day.

Malanek, I’m here on skype. We should set aside a few hours so I can catch you up on all things Eve, meta, and your new enemies lurking in the shadows.

7o, Lychton Kondur

CEO, Brave Newbies

Brave Collective

Tl;dr – this is my official statement. I will not clarify any portion of it.

1) help us to fund our srp wallet without the sov that was such a headache

2) provide us with tons of fun/hr(content) as we could fight people across new eden on our terms rather than living in the most dangerous region and fighting on other's terms as they invade our space

3) we would not be pets as pl wouldnt have any say in how we run our alliance, and each contract would be accepted on a case by case basis, and we could end the deal whenever we wanted. we dont even have to be constantly blue to PL. we could blue eachother during the contract, or even set personal blue standing for those who want to participate. and then when the contract is over we could go back to fighting PL

4) at the very least it would get our feet in the door for mercenary work, an area of eve that brave has never even dabbled in.

tldr what would be so bad about doing mercenary work with PL?

Edit: to be clear, im not trying to shit post or anything of that nature, im just saying I don't see any real reasons not to. I'm willing to move past any perceived slights, I will move with caution for sure, but will still move. For instance, no part of Elise's agreement said we couldn't bring all tech 1 ewar to every fight. Nobody said we had to bring any caps to any engagement, just that we should show up with whatever we felt like.

I'm also not seeing how they could screw us over that bad, we never really field that many valuables anyway. I mean honestly, how bad could they screw us if all we do is show up for fights with them (after being paid up front of course)

As a longtime BNI member (early Barleguet) I do not feel that I have been furnished with enough actual information to accurately gauge my position on what has transpired or why.

Too many have come forward to make extremely ambiguous statements on why hands were forced because <reasons> - which is simply not good enough.

For this reason I request that the acting leadership and Alliance CEO's step forward and, for the record, state the results of the vote, who participated, how they voted and, if possible, why.

Bonus points will be awarded to those who actually assert factual evidence to their <reasons>. I'm not particularly interested in another opinionated thread, and I probably don't care about your feelings too much either - so as much as is possible please try to stick to the facts.

Thanks to the workings of our Saviour Boat. I have focused my adderall into playing secretary/scribe. of the CNM

0:44 - Kira will be pushing leadership for a SotC.

1:00- reddit is full of spin. reddit is only going to confuse you. FLAIRS NEVER LIE. PL CFC shit stirrers

2:00 - Any effort or plans to get forums? (Kira - IT team has been working for a while. On the way)

3:00 - pls use forums. it hurts if we make it and u don't use it.

3:30 - How quickly can we return to null? Bovril in Avada 7.0

4:00 - Office in defstar? (Being worked on)

4:12 - Change of leadership and security with auth?

4:26 - 1. With arik gone and Anna succeeding, why was anna chosen and why did malanek speak for arik. 2. What were the precise reasons Lychton was removed? PL? Loss of catch? Poor execution of evac? Why was a coup chosen as the solution? Why is Anna with his involvement in all this being considered for BNI leadership? (He is not. There is a distinctive difference. He is holding it. -Kira)

7:00 - How come the ppl who led this cup have been quiet for so long. he said cup lol

7:29 - Which corps voted? How many corps Anna owned. Which 20 corps were used? Asked by Surrender Crown.

8:00 - Silent as the grave: I never came across a hierarchy....what is that gonna look like after this? Streamlined? Efficient?

9:00 - Phoenix Quan: Same as 7:29 Question.

9:26 - Hadrian: Same as 7:29 Question. Were corps being stuffed into the alliance? How does our new leadership intend to reconcile the democratic system we have with the latest coup that happened?

10:23 - Aribley flier?: How do we restore Lychton to executor of Brave Collective?

10:40 - Dartthoso Adrian: If a corp wasn't invited, does that in the game coutn as a no vote for abstention? (some dude answers: Your secret vote is defaulted to current exec. So all corps had defaulted to current exec.)

12:15 - Demetrius: Why is it anna?

12:40 - IanHimself: Make CNM more ffective? You guys are supposed to be in the know, but are withheld information. Should be oversight committee.

17:54 - Hadrian: Can you forward this to leadership "Put out as much info as you can. Get your act together."

18:25 - Bullshitting begins. I'm saving you from the cancer.

19:35 - Apollo: Doctrines question. (already done -kira)

20:05 - aggressive: 6 corps that are all under 10 members. In a vote for executor they have the same vote as drop bears? (Yes. -random dude//////None of those 6 corps are owned by the same person if it makes you feel better -Kira)

21:14 - Kadon Bear: Assume we are staying in def, bni so gud, is there anything actually planned for the summer?

22:04 - Dathros Adrian: What is the status of brave it since it costs real money? Will it turn off one day?

22:54 Serinus: question about dreddit recruiting. Would we be allowed to join and then comeback? Are they enemies? What is the status?

23:29 - Phoenix Quan: Annagate

23:42 Pushbyte: Are we staying in lowsec for a bit? Should i regear ships and srp towards lowsecf or going to delve.

24:03 - Nitrous demmimimimimii: Do we as line members get any sort of say in this at all?

26:00 - Sentinel: Was the alliance padded with corps to facilitate takeover?

26:50 - Do actual members get any vote? lel shitting on floaters and democracy

27:30 - Kira: We are going to be consolidating questions. I will take list of questions to leadership. Can't give timeframe since I am not the one answering. Post somewhere, email, sota, or q and a will be the way answers will be given.

If a person in alliance leadership were to say, hypothetically, leave BRAVE as part of a drama-storm that began with a failed attempt at a hostile takeover by a group of people that were in league with operatives from a hostile coalition...

Why in Bob's name would BRAVE agree to, upon that person's relatively quiet apology, reinstate that person and subsequently make him the functional head (or at least a leading member) of almost every critical department in the fucking coalition?

Like, yeah, go ahead and put Brutus in charge of every department in the Roman empire. There's no fucking way this will end badly.

If Malanek is leading this alliance, MALANEK NEEDS TO FUCKING SPEAK UP, because as it stands, Anna is functionally leading this alliance, and, umm, I hate to break it to you, but PEOPLE WHO HAVE PREVIOUSLY ATTEMPTED TO FUCK OVER YOUR ENTIRE ORGANIZATION ARE NOT GENERALLY STRONG CANDIDATES FOR BEING IN CHARGE OF YOUR ORGANIZATION.

I can't be any clearer about this; Anna is fucking shady. I don't understand why any reasonable person would feel that having him at the head of this boat is a strong choice.

Edit: And yes, I realize there's a certain element that folks would REALLY LIKE to believe that someone in BRAVE isn't, in fact, fucking shady; that we're a different kind of folk. But at a certain point, it's necessary to get fucking real about what's happening and face the fact that this guy may have been shady from the start.

Either corp CEOs represent their line members in which case the vote was passed against the will of 78 percent of the Brave Collective, or CEOs know what is important better in which case a 4 man corp CEO has as much sway as one with 11 thousand members.

tl;dr about corps having voted against Lychton:

Of the 10 corporations who supported the ousting of Lychton, 3 of them (Bovril, BROVI, COF) are all Brave created corporations, which would not exist or have any significance were it not for Brave Collective.

Of the 7 remaining corporations, 2 of them (Exploration Frontier Inc., Thrall Nation) would be irrelevant without Brave Collective.

Of the 5 remaining corporations 2 of them (Bearded Battlebears, Unitas) have seen significant growth post Brave Collective.

Of the remaining 3 corporations 2 of them (Kite Co,Alea Iacta Est Universal), have seen medium to insignificant growth.

It has been said by Malanek that the corporations that could not be contacted or were not present would be counted as against removing Lychton.

As it stands the vote would have been 10 to remove Lychton against 28 to keep him (the 10 known corps versus the other 28 other corps that would have defaulted to voting against Lychton as mentioned above). That being said there are a few smaller non-holder/alt corps (less than 60 members) left I haven't mentioned.

The corps in question are Jebediah, The New Gallentean Combine, Discipuli Diaboli, Burning equilibrium, Eve Refinery and Hispanic entreprise. Even assuming they all voted to remove Lychton, the vote would still be 16 vs 22 and the vote would still fail.

In order for the vote to pass LEGITIMATELY, all 6 of the smaller corps would have had to vote to remove Lychton, and alt corps would have to be "canceled out".

As they themselves said they couldnt reach everyone, and they were pressed for time, and the corps that did vote against lychton posted about it publicly, it seems likely they had to resort to alt corps to pass the vote.

My conclusion: Holding and alt corps were used to sway the vote the way they wanted.

2. How are line member represented again?

Quote from Malanek from the Q&A session: "Line members are represented via two mechanisms. The first is via the CEO of the corp they have joined. CEOs have the responsibility to represent the interest of the members of their corporation on the alliance level."

Even assuming CEOs represented their members, it is ironic that he would say this after bypassing BNI the corp for his coup aka 75 percent of the Alliances membership.

My conclusion: lel

3. Wait Anna?

Anna is now functionally in charge of the most critical systems of the alliance and has or even has had access to the most opsec info. This only some time after the failed hostile takeover last year where he was possibly affiliated with hostile entities and dralethgate.

My conclusion: What is this even.

Theres the data, make up your own mind boys! Thats all for today, toodles!

-Bap

edit: Also just in-case anyone tries to spin my shit, I've been with Brave longer than any corp CEO and 99 percent of current leadership, just saying. I've been here.

I keep seeing people complaining about how this coup went down. That it was so secret and that it wasn't democratic or some other complaint.

What were they suppose to do?

If this is a democracy like many people are complaining about, than where was the vote on the PL merc contract?

Do corps get to vote based on their member count even if 60-70% are inactive?

If they were completely open about said coup, maybe posted it on reddit for all of EVE to see, what would you expect to happen? The guy that pissed off PL at fanfest to react like a rational human being or would you expect him to throw a fit and kick everyone involved?

So please someone answer how they would have done it different and got the results that were needed?

I used to think Lychton was as good a laughing stock as leaders could be after his drunken rants, but this... this is a new level of stupid.

A coup was enacted by the second in command directly responsible for your recent troubles by his own self-admission, to depose a leader who had, doubtlessly, made some mistakes. They then proceed to go dark in the 24 hours following, with no real answers being provided, a token (hilarious) space lawyer threatening to sue people, and evidence coming out that they even tried to take BNI from Lychton with Mattias' help (which he refused to do) purely because 'they were unsatisfied with his answers'. There was no public call for him to step down, by their own admission, there was no discussion of changes that should be made.

These are your leaders. These are your CEOs. Your directors, even. These are the real source of your troubles. Not Lychton. He may well be unfit to lead, but this... this is impressive incompetence of the grandest scale. The ability to fuck up this badly is to be commended. I haven't seen the likes of this since Honey Badger Coalition hit alliance tournament season. A leader does not speak pleasantries to your face while sharpening their dagger by night. These are cowards. Not leaders.

After a lengthy emergency CNM meeting, leadership of BRAVE Collective, including CEOs and Division Heads, have reviewed what happened and reached a majority consensus regarding how to move forward from this current situation to ensure the best outcome for BRAVE.

Current BRAVE Collective leadership is united behind Malanek Askelus as alliance executor of BRAVE Collective and believe he will bring positive change to the alliance.

In the coming days, BRAVE leadership are going to issue a series of announcements regarding changes to divisions within BRAVE. Additionally, changes to the leadership structure of BRAVE Collective will be announced as they are finalised. The primary goal of any future changes will be to address the issues currently plaguing the functionality of BRAVE leadership, including communication. The intention of these changes is to enable BRAVE to fulfil its primary objective; allowing you, the members, to achieve maximum fun-per-hour.

To the current members of Brave Newbies Inc. [SB00N] who have been concerned as to the future of your corporation, we direct you to Lychton Kondur’s statement, found here . In line with this statement, the BRAVE leadership team will be glad to continue working with Lychton Kondur in his role as CEO of BNI.

I'm sitting here in my jammy jams and thought this would be a good way to pass this time. Here's my statement culled from recent replies, and I'll answer any questions asked - with few exceptions.

This whole thing has been disgusting. From start to finish. Including nearly everyone from line members up to the heads of state. Line members have proven themselves unable to contain/control themselves, corp ceo's have proven themselves unable to run an alliance, etc.

I did my part to try and support the newleadership.com because there honestly isn't an option otherwise, and I thought it would be in the best interest of Brave. I no longer consider that to be the case.

the most frustrating thing in all this, for ME has been how easily swayed line members are from one extreme to the next...following the target being thrown around by the blocs like a dog after a bone. Newbies are the new renters, and regular nerds have been so easily played by pl, cfc, and random shitters its a fucking joke.

We don't need a democracy, democracy is bullshit when it comes to eve, and it doesn't work. Authoritarian, cut-to-the-truth, harsh, pointed, take no hostages is whats necessary. Not someone who feels they need to do whats popular, just what's right.

In the end...because it will all work out or it won't. following and contributing to every drama thread and upvoting people who get boners thinking about brave dying accomplishes nothing except assisting them. There is nothing "to do about it". If things play out in a way you don't like, leave. Of sound mind, figl, naga are all excellent choices. But leaving immediately or contributing to drama doesn't do anything except add to the noise and confusion.

Last, no corp or alliance is perfect. I may disagree with Malanek, Anna, Lychton, Lquid, CEO's whoever, (most of whom I am FRIENDS with) but as long as we aren't pawns for someone else, or get elitist, or lose our "pew pew" mentality, Brave is still a pretty damn good place to be.

I'll wrap up with this: I was in skype chats with both anna/draleth's group and ADP's group when all that went down back when. I took the secondary military position because I believed it was the best thing for brave and would give motre a needed second chance. I took the mildir position because I had the capacity to deal with all the bullshit and I wasn't TOO polarizing of a figure at the time. Of the 5 "votes" I had the ability to cast against lychton, I voted one for Nerd Panic/Malanek/Anna/Lquid.

Brave compatriots, allies, ask away. PL/CFC/etc will be ignored as this post isn't for your benefit or propaganda purposes.

So here's the thing. I'm new here, so I will try to keep this short. I've only been playing EVE for about a month and I only joined BNI a few days ago, right after the debacle in Catch and right before the game of Alliance executor musical chairs. I know that this makes me a newbro and maybe even an outsider to some of you, but I also know that BNI was built by line members like me - new players who decided to leave highsec and take a chance by flying to join a ragtag group of misfits on a grand adventure - so I also know that the opinion of players like me is important, because BNI needs to keep attracting new recruits to survive, especially in trying times like these.

I don't know enough about our leaders to have a strong opinion about what's best for the Alliance, but as a new member, the leadership explosion this week doesn't inspire a lot of confidence. It seems tempting to jump ship and join a new group that is better organized, and as most of you will now know, Pandemic Legion has set up shop with a "new player friendly enterprise" in the smoldering ruins of Catch.

I decided to pop over to the Pandemic Horde page and ask them what they were about. A big part of what attracted me to Brave was the "Stay Classy" ethos. So I figured I would ask the Pandemic Horde people about what their culture is like. I asked if their members typically use racist or homophobic slurs, and if that was tolerated by their leadership.

The response? Predictable. They don't care if their members insult each other using the worst slurs that they can possibly imagine, because it's just a game, people are just joking, so lighten up, and grow a thicker skin, because nobody here "really" hates minorities (so they say). They care more about not "censoring" people's speech than they care about making their alliance an inclusive place where everyone is welcome.

So I'm going to stay with Brave, despite the recent leadership meltdown, because Brave seems to have a heart. If "Stay Classy" means anything to you ... if you don't want to spend your days listening to bitter vets chew you out on comms and call you every name in the book for any little mistake you might make ... don't jump ship now.

Brave is a place for the little guy. Brave is worth fighting for. Things might seem hopeless now, but this was just round one. We will get back up and keep fighting because we have something to fight for.

Don't leave for greener pastures and then realize you left a great group of people to play with a bunch of jaded assholes who don't care about basic human decency. Fly brave ... Stay classy.

There is nothing stopping people from other alliances from posting on this reddit and pretending to be a member of BRAVE and stirring shit up.

The other large newbie organizations want us to fail. Karma Fleet, TEST, the new Pandemic Horde and many others would love to bolster their ranks with some of our fifteen thousand members. If BRAVE was to collapse then there would be thousands of people looking for a new corp. It is in their interest to stir up shit and get people to leave us.

Remember who we are and remember what we stand for: Fun Per Hour!

Our leadership constantly goes on or leads fleets with everyone else in BRAVE and are very approachable. If you are really concerned about something you can talk to them.

There has been cries for a long time about how inactive and unconnected leadership is, now people are stepping up and trying to make systemic changes and are getting grief for that! Who are the people causing so much drama? Are they the people flying with you in Defsunun defense, going on a roam, or forming a fleet to go shoot someone? Or are they people who just want to see Brave fail?

OK, I'm gonna try to stay out of the whole coup thing. But there is something else that is really giving me the creeps, and I'm going to take that on.

If you play Eve as an MMO, you play the metagame, whether you like it or not. (Just as if you play Eve PVE you are the PVPers' rat, whether you like it or not.) I'm in Brave, I'm playing, so I'm being meta'd. Do not like. Particularly do not like being told not to fight back.

Now I'm just a fairly new line member, and not a very active one at that, so it would serve me to just keep my mouth shut, find the parts of Brave I enjoy, and let new leadership (NL) handle all the complicated stuff, as we have recently and repeatedly been told to do by Officials. But I don't see anyone effectively countering the game being played by PL's amazing Elise Randolph (PLaER), so it feels like my tribe is being punched over and over again and no one's fighting back. (And yes, PLaER is amazing, even if only "amazing at being an asshole.")

Disclaimer 1: this document has undergone a lot of revisions. You may find language (like "tribe") that expresses feelings of allegiance to Brave/HERO. Don't take that too literally, as it remains to be seen what those entities have become. Our ex-CEO was not history's best leader, but if the replacement is a bunch of goon spaiez then we have gone from bad to worse. What remains true, however, is my allegiance to the ethos I believe was at one time embodied by Brave, and that is: respect, fun, game, together, whatevs, yolo, responsible irresponsibility, respect, forgiveness, togetherness, laughter, move it move it move it, try really hard but WELP ha ha hahaahhahahaahhaa ... beloved laughter.

How is it possible I've enjoyed Brave so much while playing with Brave so little? How is it possible I've enjoyed Eve for years while playing Eve for only months? There are more things in heaven and earth, my dears, than we can ever dream ...

Disclaimer 2: there will be a lot of discussion of PLaER in this document. I am not a psychologist and I do not know the person behind the PLaER persona. I am not saying that that person is psychologically askew. However I am going to propose that in the context of Eve, and of meta combat, it will be useful, if not essential, to understand PLaER as a deeply sociopathic and abusive personality, as well as an expert manipulator (as many such people are). In fact, the original title of this essay was "Managing the Psychopath." To that end, I will be referring to PLaER as "it," both to emphasize the distinction between the persona and the person, and to help dehumanize it, which I believe is a necessary step in attacking the sympathetic image it has managed to construct for itself for many in Brave. Don't be surprised at that image; the charm of the sociopath is well known among psychologists.

Psychops will continue to be part of the game, and I want to help inoculate Brave line (and leadership too, what the hell). I keep seeing PLaER using well known techniques of abuse and manipulation, and I don't see anyone stepping up to combat it. But to battle an abuser as a third party, you often have to first convince the abused that the abuse exists, and educate them on how this has been happening without their awareness. This is just as true of soldiers as it is of abused spouses. Well, I'm not an expert at that kind of stuff, so I'm probably going to fail. But I'm Brave, and I'm willing to go in with low tank; somebody out there is coming with reps.

What follows is my analysis of one of PLaER's most recent posts:

Catch: A Tale of Two Braves - A retrospective from The Bad Guys

I am not going to copy the whole post, but if you think my editing has changed the semantics in any significant way, please call me out in the comments.

OK, so what is this picture doing here? Unfortunately, my google-fu fails me and I'm not finding a reference that is authoritative and on-point; maybe others can help with that. But here's the best I can find at the moment:

It has been known for a long time that showing your audience an image that they find pleasurable before beginning your argument makes them more receptive to your argument. By triggering a pleasurable response in the brain before you start, you smooth the road for your argument. Given Brave's overwhelmingly straight male membership, this image is not here for decoration.

PLaER is not here for the pleasure of your company; it is playing the game with every tool at its disposal.

So, some people have asked me

"I'm only here to help. Heck, you called me. I could be enjoying a nice cuppa right now, but cause you asked, I came by to hold your hand. Don't thank me, it's just my way."

on the Brave subreddit for an AAR of sorts from the PL perspective. This was intentionally made to be posted on /r/BraveNewbies but the threads got deleted and I got banned from posting there.

"I'm the victim here, baby."

I love to post, as you’ve no doubt figured out, and I do love you guys.

Setting the emotional stage: "I love you baby."

For the most part you guys like me too;

"And you love me."

Again, preparing the neurons. This is not by accident.

I’ve only once been embraced like this from another alliance and that was with PL (back when I wasn’t in PL). That said if you are of the opinion that I’m here to ~meta game~ you or sow seeds of discontent, you really don’t want to read further. It’s going to make you upset, and I have no intentions of doing anything like that.

This is where the good stuff starts. The abuser says "I love you; you love me. I'm going to explain how all the pain you've been feeling lately has been your fault. You may hear things that make you uncomfortable or that you find hard to accept; you may experience cognitive dissonance. If so, that's your fault. I warned you not to listen to me if you thought it would upset you."

IOW: "I would never hurt you babe, but you keep running into my fist."

Unfortunately due to length I had to split things into two parts. Luckily we were here twice!

Luckily.

The Beginning

...

With Phoebe we also needed to stress-test some new doctrines. We had some theories at what would be strong, but just like anything with Eve you need hands on practice to see what actually works. There is no need to rehash every fight (though I must say, you guys are so much shit to bombs) but suffice to say that you were a fantastic stress test for us. We eventually settled on what worked and what didn’t. The most spectacular failure we had, though, was to put tracking-fit Nyxes in a safe spot assigning Fighters under a scan inhibitor. I was confident that this would be the most hilarious thing ever, but it never worked. We actually had an awful track-record with dropping caps in general. You guys fielded so much triage in every fight that the only thing we could do was tank and wait for the GODBOMB.

Don't know enough about game mechanics to comment, but let's assume his analysis is legit (where "legit" means "would not be laughed out of the room if a group of random Eve experts were talking amongst themselves"). Well, the skilled spinmeister provides a fat helping of the true and unremarkable into which to stir the spin.

I know it’s narrative destroying to suggest that you guys fielded caps, but you guys did it for every single timer and got away with it.

Now PLaER gets back to work. It is imperative that it define the narrative that we desire. Brave's narrative must be "poor widdl us we have no titans no fair boo pl." It must continue to infantilize us, to cast us as lost without its help.

At the time we had no idea of this, but there was a lot of undue panic from your leadership and middle management speculating about our presence. We were just there to have fun and shoot dudes, but the leadership channels became gridlocked with doom-and-gloom drama while trying to come up with a narrative to motivate people. I think this the one areaa of the game that Brave is very weak at: managing the management.

Yes, well. I'm not privy to what happened among management, but if "undue panic" was people saying "PL is going to kick us out of Catch," yeah, I guess that was totally misguided and uncalled for, since that didn't happen. As to the last part, no argument there. Of course, it omits the fact that much of the difficulty in "managing the management" came from the fact that it was leading our ex-CEO around by the nose.

From my perspective (obviously), these guys have a very warped view of the game. It’s like they learned how to run a coalition from Chinese whispers of how to run a coalition; “you have to manage the meta, you have to fabricate a narrative” etc. In reality you only need a narrative to motivate an otherwise unwilling coalition to go to war. And you have to be very careful in making one; it’s easy for a story to backfire and make you look like an idiot. You guys weren’t in that position at all; the narrative you came up with actually disparaged you more. So there was this very gung-ho excitement phase, followed by this abject depression a few days later when things didn’t pan out (you got bombed really hard). But it’s ok, because things turned around.

"Your leadership is deluded and incompetent. You need my help, but don't fear; I will explain it all for you."

I’m not sure what happened, but you spun out of your funk and rebounded. There were some good results, and you guys came up with this really nifty plan to drop on our caps as they were grinding. Out of nowhere, 40something dreads dropped on one of our titans. Unfortunately you guys had a bit of a miscommunication and dropped on the /wrong/ Titan and it lived – but it was exciting! You guys took a swing at the giant and made him bleed. This type of action – an invention and risky decision that your military directorship was really against – inspired you guys more than anything else.

"See? I really do love you, cause I know all the best things about you. I remember the first day you put your pants on by yourself! No one knows you like I do; without me, your best memories will be lost."

The all-time killer in Eve Online – the one thing responsible for more alliance collapses and expensive losses – is hubris. We try like the plague to avoid it, but occasionally we get caught with our pants down.

Statement Against Interest! See, it can admit when it screwed up! It must be telling all that's true, and all that it's telling must be true.

This happened to PK’s Avatar. Another plan – this time executed perfectly – and you bagged your first ever Titan and Super kill. Swagger came flowing through you, and fleet participation skyrocketed. Nothing cleanses quite like the champagne bath of victory. In HED you guys successfully defended the station (using caps), and you bagged your SECOND Titan kill. That one wasn’t due to our hubris or a trap, just a questionable FC decision (yours truly) that didn’t pan out. It was actually very fun for us, and I think it goes down in Eve history as the biggest fight (in terms of ship kills) the game has seen. No narrative, no fear mongering, no bureaucratic red tape, just fun in the sun. This is where you are strongest, this is where you are a force of nature.

Swoon! Daddy loves me! Uh, mommy. Er, whatever.

We were still experimenting and learning just how strong caps were in Phoebe (an aside, we learned that they’re significantly stronger now) and then got a contract offer. In November we made the decision to just get rid of our rental empire – which was the biggest in the game – to just do our own thing. As a result it meant that we had to make money another way and we defaulted to mercenary work. Although you guys were way more fun, we started to make plans to move over to the dreaded dronelands.

The Second Coming

Having played this game for so long,

"Newbs. Newbies. Dummies (loveable, but). Have I mentioned recently how little you know (but you're so cute) and how much I know? I only say it because it's true."

and having learned from some of the best guys out there, I appreciate better than most that is almost impossible to plan more than six weeks in advance. If you try to plan out your next year – or even six months - you’ll quickly find that things fall apart.

I don't want to let this one pass, because it's such a skillful mix of true and not-true. I am quite sure it's telling the truth about not planning more than a few weeks ahead when it comes to things like deployment, engagement, and movement of assets. This will especially be true if it has been truthful about PL's leadership structure, and I see no reason to believe it has not been. If your structure is a group of co-equals proposing limited campaigns and voluntary sign up, then yes, naturally there would be an average time for those campaigns, and it would make no sense (and have no benefit) to try to plan beyond that period, since you'd never know who would come up with what crazy plan next. Fun!

But again, it omits crucial context. The kind of planning talked about in the above is only part of the planning a deeply skilled and experienced group like PL does. PLaER does not want you to think about the other kinds of planning and analysis PL (and the other experienced major players) are doing right now. Planning is not just "strategic" and "tactical." There are many levels, and the kind of players who have made it into PL don't ignore any of them. NO ONE who is a force in Eve today is ignoring Brave; it would be simply idiotic to do so, and none of these people are idiots. They know we will change the game; the question is, will we change it in ways that will be inconsistent with the survival of their preferred style of play?

No one successfully leads a long lived collaborative effort involving a large number of people without learning how to manage and mitigate risk, and Brave represents the greatest risk to the established order that has come along for a long time. So you'd better believe they are all paying attention. They are going to continue to try to tear us apart, because Eve is a power struggle, and power is never surrendered without a fight. They will fight us at every turn, with everything they have, because they have an investment in this game. They did not become major powers by giving away the advantage.

So on our way out I approached your leadership about coming up with a deal so that we would leave you guys alone.

We asked to buy some of the supercaps you were building for someone else in exchange for leaving your sov alone. Not bending at the knee or paying a tithe to be our pets, but just buying some ships you were building at buildcost +15%. Some of you leadership were keen on the deal – many

What are you thinking right now? Are you thinking "wait a minuite, wait, stop, what did he, uh, it just say, slow down, back up?" Because if you are, THANK YOU! Let's go back a bit.

We asked to buy some of the supercaps you were building for someone else

I've got to say, when dealing with a persona like PLaER, hubris is a thing. It does think it is superior, it does hold us in contempt, Even as it says to us (and to itself) that it does not. The amazing thing about the psychopath is that he will often tell you to your face that he is lying, so confident is he in his sway over you that he believes it will do him no harm to do so. (There was true-crime tv show on recently about a serial killer who played audiotapes of his victims' screams for a number of oblivious people.) So it is remarkable for me to see PLaER include in the above some context that the ordinary self-serving liar would be sure to omit.

"supercaps you were building for someone else"

"for someone else"

IT IS ESSENTIAL FOR THE ABUSER TO SEE YOU SIN. His whole game turns on his ability to find something, something legit, for which you will blame yourself. Once he has that, everything becomes your fault. He will hit you and beat you and wear you down until finally you give in, you do something and suddenly you are no longer true to yourself, you are not yourself, you are lost. You have nothing left but him. (Or in some cases, her.) You must keep him, because without him you are nothing, there is nothing left.

So let me lead you down this garden path, listen to the story of the eminently reasonable and fair proposal, peace, survival, you'd still have GE!, and HED!, and your stuff!, and oh this lovely apple, but they didn't do it, they wouldn't do it, those fat, selfish confused leaders of yours, really, wouldn't you have taken the deal, I was more than fair ... and by then you've bit the apple, you've taken the deal and you're lost, you've lost it, lost Brave, lost yourself.

They were for someone else, weren't they? But that doesn't matter, it's survival, isn't it, and this is Eve, after all. Brave's "word" isn't important, our reputation, the whole "classy" thing, our ability to make future deals with credibility ... hell, we can worry about that later. We gotta look out for ourselves first, right?

It is true, I am trying to make the case that PLaER is an evil and insidious ... persona.

weren’t informed all together – and others were of the opinion that it would set a bad precedent. Eventually the information leaked that we were leaving (XIX made a morale speech saying that we would be coming down to assist them), and the tone changed instantly. It seemed to me that you guys thought you had found some hidden leverage (the intel came from an /r/eve thread) and wanted to boast proudly how PL was thwarted! I personally thought the deal was fair and wasn’t a bad precedent, but of course I came up with the deal so it shouldn’t be a surprise.

Mm hm.

Anyways we left and you guys went back do doing your thing. I was still active on the Brave subreddit, and of course there was a bit of drama because honestly it’s something you guys love.

"Yes, YOU love the drama, YOU create the drama, I'm just sitting here quietly and you keep DRAMAing, darling I wish you'd stop."

I don’t get it, but it’s undeniably part of you

Part of you. Part of you.

... We started doing our thing again and like clockwork, the “narrative and meta” questions started coming back. You guys

"You guys! With your Narrative! and your Meta! You!"

...

... it on it and saving the system. It was honestly one of the funniest things ever.

She's a hell of a songwriter, I've gotta say. Oh, and you're totally not being led around by the penis. (Analogous or otherwise.)

As far as strategic objectives, you guys were doing markedly better. Every system that you showed up to got saved. Fleet participation was high, more and more people were getting into Tengus, and losses were much lower. But then the drama snake reared its head once more. Apathy got kicked, Test and HONOR decided to leave HERO, and more bureaucratic drama came oozing from some leadership.

"Some" leadership. Not the one I like, of course, just those other ones.

We just wanted to keep having the fights, and objectively we were getting incredibly good at them. But instead of the exuberance and carefree attitude we saw some months prior - the attitude that led to three super kills – we saw vitriol and sour attitudes. It seems to me that the “narrative” some people tried to craft

"Why do you keep doing that! You know you just end up crying baby! You and your drama and your dumb attempts at narrative, sorry but it is, you can't help it, it's who you are, it's part of you, shush now, listen to me, I'll tell you how it was, how it is, how it's gonna be."

just got eaten up by the leadership people instead of the line member. A toxic Ouroboros, of sorts.

Don't know who that is. Wish I did. Get the sense something interesting is happening here. Can someone explain?

Some have argued

"What do you say to the people who claim you beat your wife, Mr. Jones? Yes, those other people. Not me. No, it's not me saying YOU BEAT YOUR WIFE, no, it's those other

people.youbeatyourwifeyoubeatyourwifeyoubeatyourwifeyoubeatyourwife"

that the “average line member” was burning out, but fleet participation was going up. I never really got the impression that the line member hated life in Catch.

The funny thing is that when you contradict yourself at the end of a sentence, it really does not cancel the impression left on the brain.

"I heard you killed your wife, Mr. JonesSMITH, oh but I guess not."

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

Please respond quickly to the following question by answering "yes" or "no" silently in your head

.

Do you have the impression that Mr. JonesSMITH killed his wife?

[edit: FUCK! I blew up my demonstration by re-using the name. But you get the idea.]

A Tale of Two Braves

This is when I began to notice two very different Braves. The one, excitable players – new and old alike – committed to having fun with a penchant for making sdrama from nothing. The other, a bloated and over-stressed paper-pushing behemoth sucked into a black hole of its own making.

"Be afraid; your leadership is rotten to the core."

Bickering and in-fighting created this circle of self-pity that started to bleed out of leadership and into the 99% of Brave that just likes to have fun.

"Don't listen to those people, don't trust them! They don't know you like I do, they don't love you like I do. Listen to me, don't trust them."

It’s not a very flattering picture I’m painting, and I’m not necessarily blaming them

"It's not their fault that they are bad people."

– leading a coalition is a tricky process – but that is what I feel happened. Nobody was trying to be bad or cause some sort of self-destruction, it was just this petri dish that we inadvertently

"Inadvertently! So inadvertently! And of course there are no goon and pl and dog knows who else spies adding to the mix, cause in Eve that is definitely not a thing."

added heat to.

Our intentions were never to create some cracks or conquer Catch. As I mentioned before, planning more than 6 weeks in advance never actually works. We wanted to pass the time having fun with people we knew could have fun. We never really thought of you as a game preserve, nor did we want to ~meta you~ for some geopolitical end. I found it really hard to deny some of these accusations because the response was – quite unironically – “well that’s what someone who is trying to manipulate us would say”. It was really comical, truth be told, but the average line member seemed to appreciate my presence so I just shook those guys off. Like I said, they are The Other Brave.

Eventually GE happened.

And we accidentally sovd.

I explained what happened in this thread (along with some Dominion Sov Q&A http://www.reddit.co...nforced/cpgbvx1) but tl;dr our AUTZ was waiting for fatigue to end and shot GE with your SBUs up.

So accidentally!

Later we dropped our own SBUs in GE to ... And you did this while your main FC was at Fanfest. Real talk, you deserve to be proud of that showing. Meanwhile I was raging at my AUTZ for riling you up like this, assuming that every fleet we faced would be 500 strong now and we’d have to think up of new ways to fight you.

Let me keep you off balance by alternating praise with FUD; it's what we masta PLaERs do.

With things dying down, we started to plan for our immediate future. I was spitballing some ideas with other FCs and we had a thought: what if we took Brave with us?

And here we go. The last real threat to the established order was TEST, and they were meta'd to near irrelevance by mitts. And his best move by far in that campaign was to make TEST a goon pet early in its existence, thereby alienating the organization from its natural constituents. (I'm not bashing TEST, if I'd been playing Eve back then rather than just reading about it I'd have wanted to join. (I did want to join, but would not have qualified, despite being a years-long redditor.) But we were facing a meta master and had not really learned how to play that game.)

Don't think PLaER missed that tactic. Divide, co-opt, destroy. That's what it has in mind for us. The absolute best outcome would be for it to make us a pet. And that is absolutely where PLaER was leading our former CEO, who was so visibly crumbling under the strain that he'd have loved that particular port in this particular storm. Properly managed, the abused always runs to the abuser for comfort; they've been cut off from all other hope, they have no where else to go.

At Fanfest a few of our FCs were hanging out with Blue Ice and said to me “hey this guy is cool, figure out a way to work with this guy”. The consummate facilitator, I

and modest too

came up with a plan and pitched it to your leadership: we’ll blue one another (and obviously not touch Catch), split the profits 50-50, and go do contract work together. You guys could be as autonomous or integrated as you wanted, and could stop at any time.

"And don't worry honey, I'll be letting you know what you want to do every step of the way."

The figure we were offered at the time was 600b, splitting it 50-50 for 8 weeks. A fair amount of money, but I understood that some people would probably need some motivation to work with the guys that were so vigorously shooting them in the face for a few months.

Do tell.

(An aside: please don't hear me saying "forevergrr PL!" PLaER is not PL, as it has made very clear, and PL is not PLaER. I'm sure that some PL folk are chillovely; that has nothing to do with what we are talking about here, which is learning to combat psychops.)

I knew full well we’d get maybe 100-150 dudes to come on fleets with us, but to me that was enough. I was confident people would have fun and numbers would swell. Unfortunately, what I have dubbed The Other Brave apparently didn’t like it. I’m honestly not sure how much of this leadership proper knew of this proposition, but the response I got was – at best- tepid.

"You know honey, sometimes you are such a good girl, but sometimes that OTHER YOU comes out. Why you got to be so bad and stubborn and hard to handle. Do I have to come smack some sense into you again?"

I don’t know if it was a trust issue

BWAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHAHH cough cough

or if your leadership honestly believed this was just a contrived plot to steal away their members. I’ll be honest, you guys have hemorrhaged a lot of talented people and –apart from Apathy guys – none joined PL. I was pretty gutted that we had to shelve the plan, but things happen and I respect that. I told your guys that no matter what you chose we wouldn’t hold the decision against you. This is going to be hard to believe given what happened next (we took GE and HED), but we were quite honest in this. We actually had struck a deal with a member of the Brave Diplomatic team (who was acting on his own) to not take any final timers so long as you guys were actively defending. When you guys announced plans for Brave Mercenaries, this benefactor informed us that the deal was off and we could do whatever.

A little salvo for NL. Lets let them wonder who their freelancing diplo is.

Almost there

I'm rapt.

Since I’ve been rambling for a bit I would be remiss if I didn’t restate a few disclaimers. When I’m saying here is my honest interpretation of events – through the PL lens, of course. If you are of the mind that I’m out to coup attempt #12 or spin you into death, you definitely don’t want to read on. I am doing this purely because you guys asked me for my opinion.

"Remember! All your fault!"

People in Eve are motivated by different things. PL is motivated first and foremost by tears generated from our actions.

Yup. Definitely not a sociopath.

It’s weird and hard to understand

No. No, it's not. That's part of the ego of PLaER and its kind, the sense that it is a deeply mysterious and unique kind of entity. But it's not. There's nothing mysterious about psychopathy; it's etiology maybe, but the thing itself is quite a common-as-dirt phenomenon. Unfortunately.

if you’re not part of it, but it’s what we do. Your evacuation/move/deployment thing, whatever it was, is to date the biggest clusterfuck I’ve seen in spaceships. I say this from a place of love, but it was a complete disaster.

"You are incompetent and can't manage your shit, and no one in your little club can save you. WHY DO YOU KEEP MAKING ME YELL AT YOU!!"

I can sort of understand how it happened, though. The Other Brave – the management types – figured that they had their bargaining chip. PL wanted to work with Brave, so we wouldn’t dare take HED or GE! Have we met? Capitalizing on chaos is our bread and butter. Specifically when you guys singled out three systems you would defend at all costs, we just ran at them to see what would happen. So that is how we accidentally took Catch.

Sooo accidentally. Have I said how accidentally? It was not at all PLs collective intention to limit the size and effectiveness of Brave/HERO by conducting a drawn-out campaign designed to confuse, frustrate and demoralize the line members, so that maybe we'd lose enough of them that we wouldn't be so fucking terrifying.

But we don’t hate you and we don’t want you to fail.

We just want you to be small and mostly ineffective.

Brave do a great service and are largely really cool people. The Other Brave – the 1%- do you a bit of a disservice. But hey! They’re learning. So long as, like Brave members, they’re OK to take criticisms then all is well. I still want to work with you guys on a contract in the future and that offer we had is forever on the table. I can’t promise it’ll be 600b, but you can pick and choose.

"Hurry now, you missed your best deal; you better be ready to jump at the next offer."

In the meantime, HED and GE are both freeported (if they aren’t now they will be shortly – make sure to check with something cheap first), so if you have things in there you can get them out whenever. Be very careful moving things out, we certainly won’t be guarding the path or blue’ing people – but we’re not in the business of trapping the livelihood of anyone; the silent curses are not where our fun comes from.

Be vewwy vewwy carefuw, I'm hunting wabbits!

(Sorry, it's late and I'm getting punchy.)

In fact we love Brave so much you have inspired a bunch of people in PL to embrace the new players. Whenever you look at player retention graphs it’s always depressing to see just how many people try the game and just give up. So following your lead we’ve made a newbie group all our own called Pandemic Horde (/r/PandemicHorde). We're a bit different, but the same underlying idea.

"as karmafleet. :D"

Eck. PLaER, really? After all this, this jerking around, this puffery, this posturing as the 2nd coming of mitzi, you pull this? Such a weak and come-lately imitation of a tactic that has been a complete failure? Hmmm. You may not be so invincible after all.

... They'll be living in HED, too, so when you fly through be sure to teach them what it means to lose a ship in style.

Because that's the best you can do, lose stylishly. Remember, that's your role.

... Everything that I stated in the State of the Coalition is true; you guys are a fantastic group with an amazing potential.

"I loves ya, baby!"

Your future is bright, your stuff is not locked in Catch, and I look forward to the day that we can fly together. I hope the read wasn’t too dry and you found it interesting. Of course, I appreciate any feedback or suggestions of topics that you may be interested in.

My suggestion for you, dear PLaER, is to continue to be very worried about Brave (or its descendants). You are up against a group with amazing potential, and it's only going to get more difficult for you to stir the kind of shit you've been stirring. I'm quite sure you're on the phone with Lychton right now doing your best (in your don't-be-mad-be-mad doublespeak) to make him blow up and burn the house down. But you know what? We've had some practice at surviving having our house burned down. Thanks!

See you in space.

And to all my Brave [or ex-Brave] bros, sisters, and non-gender-identifying siblings of choice,

I had a very productive meeting with Malanek Askelus, and we are preparing our statements for our change of command ceremony to be held this weekend. This is an amazing time for BNI/BRAVE/HERO, and I encourage you to attend what will likely be a thunderous, debauchery fueled event.

In the meantime, There are some management level things that still need to occur in order to seamlessly perform this transition, as well as some challenging scenarios that we both have to address and finalize. I encourage everyone within BRAVE to keep a happy heart, stay classy, and to undock and die repeatedly in the meantime.

Remember, that despite the drama on the various forms of media, we are BRAVE. And the nucleus of brave is you, the individual newbie. <3 you all and 7-motherfucking-o.

I've not been active for a few months and miss you bunch of space fucks like nothing else.

I saw the palace coup on the subreddit and was instantly saddened. I have had nothing but positive interactions with Lychton and he's been responsible for amazing things in his tenure. HERO itself and the capture of Catch and numerous deployments before that.

Even in a micro sense he was responsive to me. I was managing a small drug manufacturing enterprise and he several times personally went out of his way to help me. I was impressed by the small things he did to help given being a space emperor is not a trivial job.

As I always understood it there were no confidence measures available to the CNM that could have transparently and with proper debate enacted the same out come.

Instead the conspirators decided to connive and kick someone who has poured himself into this alliance since the beginning by exploiting a game mechanic we all knew existed but trusted corps brought in wouldn't exercise but would use the CNM framework. They did it when he wasn't awake to ensure it happened.

But they hurt their friend in doing so. For better or worse we get wrapped up in these games. We build friendships as well as blow up space ships. They back handed someone who had trusted them and believed in them.

I know eve has a reputation for this sort of thing. But in reality it's not a great thing to hurt your friends by conniving against them. It makes good drama and coverage in the mitani and it highlights eve is built without guard rails. But the human impact is still real.

This is the greatest tragedy in this escapade is the shitting on Lychton who loves us all deeply. In my mind Brave always represented the best of eve - which was maximizing fun per hour and making friends in space and blowing up spaceships. That required us to be classy and cool to each other. It required us to not shit on people.

This was the ultimate shit on someone move. It was public and humiliating. It was done maliciously and attempted to be an entire crushing of everything a person worked for out of love for the newbie.

It was not cool. It was not classy. It was just rude and unnecessary.

I like basically everyone who perpetuated the act of shitting on and humiliating Lychton. Sadly I imagine Lychton does too. The best I can hope is those people didn't think about what this would mean to the human being and friend that sits on the other side of microphone.

This incident makes me think brave should revert to a single member corp alliance based on BNI with a benevolent dictator. There should be holding corps where game mechanics require it but those corps should transfer all shares to the dictator. All other corps should be coalition mates at best.

Matias picked Lychton to succeed him because he knew Lychton would never pull a dick move like this. While democracy is a great thing nothing beats the benevolent dictator if the dictator is picked with care and precision.

In eve more than strategy or tactics at the leadership level what you need as a organization leader is honor. Lychton may or may not have made blunders I don't know I'm not in the game enough to judge and stayed away from leadership roles on purpose - I run a large organization in real life and have no desire for that heartburn in my game life. But Lychton always acted honorably and with the best interests of the newbie in his heart.

The conspirators can't not be said to have done this because they just did a deceitful coup against their friend. They can't be a legitimate leader in eve because every one of us should believe they will just as easily do it to a line member if they'll do it to their friend. They are prime candidates for stealing assets if it suits them or breaking up the alliance if it suits them or anything if they feel like it suits their agenda.

Lychton for better or for worse would never ever have done any of these things which is why Matias picked him.

And I for one will remain loyal to Lychton.

(And for the record if I had been logging in I would have had a vote because I control a small corp in alliance and would have voted against the coup - because my small corp has no reason to exist other than to let me drop sov structures and refine drugs I fully expect this post to get me kicked out of alliance)

If you check that list, you'll see that two of the mods, Lorilath and ToastyBiggums were added just a day ago. I can confirm to you that both of these guys are currently censoring any posts on the Brave subreddit that are critical of the personalities behind our recent coup. At least now we have identified two of Anna's hatchet-men.

UPDATE: So one of the Brave subreddit mods (Dunk Dinkle) chimed in saying that no posts were being deleted on the subreddit but hesitated to post a screenshot of the mod log for the subreddit. And below you can see the reply from Matias Otero, former CEO of Brave, confirming the censorship: http://imgur.com/cnf8knj,VPcOIrp (PROOF)

It's been a long time since I've written one of these. Last time I did, we were still mired dick-deep in Catch and HERO, fighting for scraps of new members underneath BRAVE's table while we slowly bled older players. Recruitment had picked up a bit, but we were barely outpacing attrition and it looked like the best I was going to get for the foreseeable future was a simple perpetuation of the status quo. It was kind of shit, but it was better than losing people outright.

While we pushed ourselves along and managed to keep everything running, we started to see a bit of an increase in the number of people we were getting from BRAVE. The drip became a trickle, which became a stream. It's been no big secret that BNI has been plagued with a myriad of issues, ranging from benign incompetence to wilful malfeasance; the burdensome title of "Leadership Shitshow" that had been held so long ago by the TEST of Fountain seemed to have been lifted from our shoulders and placed upon those of BRAVE instead.

With that in mind, TEST had always supported BRAVE from its foundation. Even though we had been cast out from Fountain and into the cold wilderness of shitty lowsec, we did what we've always customarily done for groups like theirs; we sent them ISK to start a ship program similar to test_free, offered to extend what little advice a nullsec outcast alliance could give and told them that if they wanted to hang out and do spacethings, we'd be there.

It wasn't long before their totally open recruitment practices totally outpaced ours. Their numbers swelled and their recruitment presence became a juggernaut we simply couldn't compete with. When the idea was conceived to form HERO, however, we were glad to go with them; not only would it give us a re-entry into sov null, the part of the game we've typically enjoyed the most (despite its mechanics kek), it would give us the opportunity to keep working with new players and hopefully pick up a few more of our own.

So we took Catch.

What we didn't know going into it, however, was that while BRAVE's origins and early days brought back waves of nostalgia from the yesteryears of Dreddit, it had taken a strange turn. Unlike the bloated, asshole-ridden leadership that had led to TEST's near-demise, BNI had grown a tumor of bureaucracy that would make an inner-city DMV office manager rethink his life choices. There were weekly meetings, redacted and published minutes, action items, council elections and pretty much every conceivable structural dinosaur that died long ago with the likes of Majesta Empire.

Their skill at structural necromancy aside, we did our best to try to work with them. Most of the time we managed to struggle through and make progress, though we weren't without our hilariously high-profile setbacks (sorry Spectre Fleet, I'm still not reimbursing your Feroxes). For the most part, things were improving.

In the background I spent every possible opportunity begging BNI to fix their leadership structure. Move your internal rules enforcement shit to diplomats and axe that section of HR. Give diplomats more power instead of having a team of a dozen useless people with two dudes that could actually do things. Every single person I'd talked to was in firm agreement that the CNM served no practical purpose, save for one person; their exec.

Lychton was obstinate in his refusal to dissolve the CNM. Their private subreddit (yes, subreddit, not forum) had grown to a dizzying fifty people with access. Everybody in it wrestled for their own interests and their own benefit. Corp CEOs pushed for changes that would benefit them while others pushed for changes that would hurt them. It blew up spectacularly in one meeting that resulted in their old head of IT leaking their entire API database on the EVE Online forums, the aftermath of an attempt by Anna, their IT head and one other to grab power within the alliance.

Meanwhile much of their infrastructure was a disaster. People were being admitted to the corporation with no checks whatsoever, leading to daily awoxing. Even without these checks, strangely enough, there were near-constant complaints that it was taking people as long as a week to be accepted. They had no HR tools of their own at all. Their newbie programs were a free-for-all and their loss rate for new players was staggering.

Ultimately, TEST just couldn't stay. We'd have probably left earlier if I hadn't defended BRAVE's potential to improve for so long; I had hope that one of the largest recruiters of new players in the game could right the ship they'd been slamming into every nearby reef with our help, but their refusal to change was simply untenable in the end. Lychton, while at least generally competent, had become less and less active, using the weekly CNM meetings as a crutch to try to band-aid his lack of availability, and was probably the greatest reason he refused to dissolve it. Their upper leadership had devolved to simply doing things on their own, often failing to talk to each other or plan decisions before making them. It led to fractured messages, botched deployment information, no seeding whatsoever, hundreds of players' assets being locked down (thanks for the freeport PL) and many of their members simply left out to dry.

That's bullshit, and their recent coup is just as bullshit. The people who have taken control of the alliance are some of the same people who have been responsible for its abhorrent leadership and it's been orchestrated by the same person indirectly responsible for their IT services collapse the last time they tried to pull some shit like this. As far as I'm concerned, it's the last gasps of air bubbling up from a ship that's already halfway-sunk. The people who signed up to play with them deserve better than the stupid shit they're being dealt by the people who are supposed to make the game fun for them. I have hope, but no confidence, that they'll manage to eventually right the ship like we did with TEST.

I guess that brings us to the part that's actually the CEO update for Dreddit. Much like when we extended our hand to BRAVE leadership during its founding, we extend our hand to its members during its collapse. As of now, I'm creating a new entry criteria for BRAVE refugees. If you've been in BRAVE for 30 days or more and are reasonably active, you no longer need to have an active reddit account of a certain age to be able to apply to Dreddit. We may be a corporation founded on Reddit but my time in HERO has endeared me to its members.

To that effect, I've added two new people to my HR team, Acid Katelo and Yolo Swagtron. If you're interested and aren't 100% sure what to do, join the channel "Dreddit Recruitment" in-game and talk to either them, Needmore Longcat or myself for more information or help applying. We usually get to applications within 24 hours but if we miss yours feel free to let us know. If you already have a friend from your time in BRAVE that's joined TEST, you can also have them vouch you in instead.

This has been one of the craziest weeks for me. This has obviously been turbulent for our corporation, our alliance, and our coalition. For those unaware, on Sunday night, after we completed our council management meeting, a vote thing was initiated to transfer the executor corp from Brave Holdings to a group called Nerd Panic. This was done, um, I can't explain the mechanic because I don't understand it, so whatever.

Essentially what happened is there was a lot of frustration among the CEOs of our sister corps, among our council, and these were things that were manifesting themselves to a place where Brave was getting really inwardly bitter on itself. The prolonged campaign with PL, the absolutely disastrous evac, all those things that came together that everybody took a part of whether as a victim or as an aggressor; people's nerves were on edge, and Anna Niedostepny went through and initiated the action. The CEOs being forced with their binary option chose to elect this new corp, and when I woke up on Monday morning getting ready to go to my real life job, I had a text message on my phone that says "lol internet got dunked whatever 420", and that's when I realized that I had lost the Collective.

Not knowing what to do, I had two options. I needed to figure out whether I was going to fight, or whether I was going to just say fuck it and walk away into the sunset. I actually chose the latter and said what's done is done, I'm not going to hemorrhage any of our new players or the people that don't care about the meta, because they're all about just having fun and doing bullshit. So I reached out to the successor-in-waiting, Malanek Askalus, and we talked and although I disagreed with the way that things went about, I would make sure that the newbie interests would be at heart. So we set a change-of-command ceremony for tonight, actually 8 hours from now, so that we could just do this and move forward. During that time, I started getting calls from the CEOs who had voted against me. People were apologizing, not necessarily for why they had voted, but just because of the way that it was done. I also received a weird outpour of support from across the New Eden community. With that said, I just want to briefly say to TEST, Fweddit, Goonswarm, the CFC at large, Black Legion, CVA, the wormhole guys, I do appreciate. [...] Everybody in New Eden was kinda on board, and we were providing great content on Reddit, on the Internet, everything going on, and I guess that was fun for everybody. I will say there were some funny posts on Reddit, it managed to give me a little bit of a reprieve from the absolute bullshit that was going on.

But anyway, things became clear when aDAMNPATRIOT from Dropbears came to me, I think this was Wednesday, maybe Thursday, saying that they had gone and collected a bunch of evidence about what had happened in the wake of an eve subreddit thread where Lquid had admitted to reversing my call and creating the very evac avalanche that ended up leading to my ousting. I talked with aDAMNPATRIOT, he presented me the list of evidence, and he basically said, the CEOs feel bad, they want to come back. I said, if you guys do this, you need to be the ones that did it because you guys were the ones that voted against me, the CEOs need to be the ones that vote back, I will not fight for this. If you guys do this, then cool, if not, then we're going to go ahead and do the transfer. Quickly I want to give a quick shoutout to Suev Raylap and Cerelem from Dropbears for their mind-blowingly detailed analysis of everything that was going on. So yeah, thanks guys. Anyway, with that said, this morning, I got a message from PATRIOT who said that the CEOs support you, they don't like what happened, they're still not happy with what led up to it and there's a lot of work to do, but the method by which this was performed, whatever coup number this is, wasn't classy and wasn't Brave. So this morning I was told that I regained the major support of the alliance, and so I was able to kick Nerd Panic and 6 or 7 alt corps that were associated with the fuckery. And as it stands today, after four days, I am humbly proud to be reinstated as the leader of Brave Newbies, Brave Collective, and HERO Coalition.

Now first I want to address the newbies. I am sorry for anything that you experienced while all of us up here in this weird meta tier were sitting there fighting with our dicks. You guys don't need that. Your guys' only job is to go outside, have fun, undock, die, learn some stuff, PI, explore, go on fun fleets, drink some beer, get on our plug.dj, have fun and enjoy the experience of being new to this game, new to this atmosphere, and new to New Eden at large.

To the council members: we're all good, there's no love lost, this whole thing was just a shitty situation, and I look forward to just moving forward.

To the CEOs of the sister corps: this has been a pretty resounding gut check. One of the things we've always said is that Brave is a place to foster and grow and learn with each other, and if there's an issue that's going on, we should be able to talk about it in a reasonable manner. I understand that many of you guys still have some pretty serious misgivings and this is why I'm going to publicly announce it here that over the next 48 hours I'm going to have a 1:1 talk with every single sister corp CEO and we're going to hash it out. You're going to pull no punches. You're going to tell me what's going to on, and I'm going to defend myself a little bit, but at the end of the day I'm going take everybody's feedback and I'm going to come back with an action plan this week that I'm going to present solely to the CEOs.

To the other groups in New Eden: I'm glad that we were able to give you guys some entertainment. This has not been that fun on the inside, but everybody likes to dance on the backs of the bruise(?) and I get that. I look forward to supplying you guys with normal generated drama instead of this unusual high-calorie affair.

Now I will say that before this announcement, I did speak with Malanek, the now-deposed leader-in-waiting or whatever you want to call him. He was a little confused, and he was like what the hell happened, because we had agreements for this plan in place. I explained to him that I too understood what it felt like to go to bed and wake up not knowing that the world had shifted. But I want to publicly say that despite all the things that happened this week, I do not consider Malanek to be more than a Manchurian candidate, a person who stepped up when I couldn't talk to everybody during the greater calamity that is the evac, and as an affable choice he was the prominent candidate. I hold no ill will to Malanek himself. We are going to have to have some more discussions to figure out how we can move forward.

Now with that said, there have been decisions that have been made while under his weeklong tutelage. Effective immediately, all deals that have been performed in the past 4-5 days have been rescinded and are now in stasis. Until I review every single action that we have taken, those actions are now revoked. So to my intergalatic enemies, frienemies, orange/red donut guys, I don't know what deals have been made, but those deals are now temporarily off until I can review them and make sure that they appropriately coalign with the spirit of BRAVE.

Lquid. I'll be honest, I don't fully understand his role or not role. But I will say that it fucking hurt my feelings. I have spent hours and hours with that dude, he's a good guy, we know shit about like our personal lives, I would actually dare say that we were friends--we are friends. And that's why this was so troubling. Before this announcement, I sent off a ping that we were going to have this meeting, and Lquid fired back a ping saying that he wasn't going to dump services, and for that, I want to thank Lquid, for caring about the newbies and making sure that we're not making this place more volatile than it already has been. Now with that said, I want to see a few things as a show of good faith before we start having the hard talks that we need to start having about how we're going to move past this. I want you to immediately reimburse me the 100 billion isk that you took from the TLOGI coffers when you thought that I was going to eviscerate my newbie corp. There is absolutely no way I would have done that, and as a sign of good faith, I would like you to return that so we can apply it for our newbies. For the rest of the stuff for services, we can talk about that offline, I'm not trying to shit on you bro, I'm just disappointed. But whatever. We're friends and we're going to get past this.

Now Anna. Anna Niedostepny. Hold on, let me drink a fucking beer. Dude, I don't know man. I don't fucking know. Last year, you fucking dumped me with Draleth. Actually, no, let's back up. Two years ago, you approached me when I was scouting out fucking Rahadalon as an alternate system because Ilfay Dickhead, whatever his name is, was doing the other one, and you approached me, you were still I think in Bombers Bar. And you came to me, and you were like oh we want to do some stuff, and I'm like alright cool, and I had told Matias and Ilfay, like yo, you were there, and we brought you in. I've known you… I mean, I've known you as long as I've known Nancy, I've known you as long as I've known Nicholas. Almost as long as Matias. And you know, whatever, you had your fuckery, but you're a fun dude. We'd blow up shit. You taught me how to do bombs, that's cool. And then Draleth fucking happened. And you did that weird shit, I'm not going to get into it because you know what's going on. We booted you. And you came back to me and you apologized to me, in confidence, you said you were sorry, and I believed you. And I hope you don't think I'm shitting on you now in public because of whatever, I just don't want to let any more spin fucking get out of control, so we're just going to have a real talk right now with everybody listening. Everybody grab your fucking popcorn.

You apologized, and I forgave you. And I told you that you were going to have to earn my trust back. And you did. It took months, but you did. Lquid ended up vouching for you, and we realized that you are a good asset to us, we just had to manage you. There's been times when you would go and say things that were counter to what I was doing, or you would kind of lead on the leash, and I'd pull you back, and we're all good, you know, you remember those things. You know, whatever, it's part of the thing. I do believe that you want Brave to succeed, and you, in your own weird way, that you were trying to accomplish something good.

However. Your brand is fucking tainted. My trust in you is gone. What you did to me actually fucking hurt my shit. And I had no way to do it because I had to go to fucking work and be a productive member of society. And I started thinking about all the times that we were there and we were talking and doing our things and discussing shit. And you did me like that, dude? Come on, man. Whatever. Everything that you're doing with the alliance is immediately revoked, and actually at the end of this I'm going to kick you out of the fucking alliance. But it's okay because I hear that fucking Karmafleet is recruiting so maybe you can go hang out with Porkbutte. I do feel sorry for you bro, I wish we could be friends, but I can't. I can't do this with somebody that fucked me over twice.

Now let me end this on a high note. To all of our newbies: we love you, everything's great, everything's fine, we're still going to have the 8:00 meeting tonight, we're going to fucking blow up all these fucking ships, and we're going to get into some dumb shit, and we're going to do whatever. My immediate plan for the next 48 hours is to talk with Lquid who holds our services and we're going to figure out what's going on, I'm going to get a sensing session from our CEOs and get an honest assessment of where we are, and we're going to come up with a new plan.

In the meantime, I have another announcement: I am temporarily transferring the CEOship of HERO Coalition to June Ting for a period of two weeks. I am going to use these two weeks to get BRAVE back on course and to steady the waters. Once that period is done, I'm going to speak with June, we're going to get all caught back up, get back in the fold, and I am going to retake the help of HERO Coalition, but right now I need to protect my newbies. I just do not have the bandwidth to fix us internally and to project us as a force externally. So I'm going to trust June and Norcat and the rest of the coalition to keep the engines burning and give me my two weeks so we can lick our wounds and fix our baby. Nothing is going to stop our coalition because you can't stop an idea. We are here to undock, have fun, and fucking die.

Lastly before I end this meeting and I go to start creating a bunch of fucking alt accounts with CEO corps so that this kind of fuckery can't happen again, I want to leave you with one last word. To quote my great, great Baltimore friend Omar Little: you come at the king, you best not fucking miss. 7o, Lychton Kondur, out.

edit again: most of this was answered on coms, i'll come back later and answer some here maybe, hopefully other people will answer them <3 i'll be mostly afk this weekend since i was supposed to spend it with the wife but the eve happened RIP

OK guys, seems this needs to be said based on some of the comments already made and damage done. An official investigation into the coup fuccbois is pending and the results will be published. The only officially guilty parties at this time are - liquid, anna, and a dude playing under the name toasty biggums.

Everyone else involved in the scumbaggery is presumed innocent until proven guilty.

Those listed were involved in convincing CEOs to support the coup according to sources, but that doesn't mean that they had prior knowledge that this had been planned, just that they were also convinced it was a good idea. So in retrospect I shouldn't have allowed so many to be included, since it obviously makes it look like they are considered to be malicious, when that's not what we meant at all. Sorry about that.

So to everyone: don't make accusations you can't support. If you have indicting evidence on someone, mail it via reddit to http://www.reddit.com/u/NoMiT, aka suev raylap, who was instrumental in uncovering the plot, and is leading the investigation team.

The coup attempt has been slapped down, the worst schemers have been removed, and now is the time to move onwards and upwards. Long live the King